ECLIPSE RICH CLIENT PLATFORM Part 1 Introduction

Chapter 1. Rich Client Platform  High-quality & High-speed  Provide frameworks and infrastructure  Collaborate  Work offline

The Eclipse  Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE)  Free  Wide range of tools for languages and systems

The Eclipse Rich Client Platform  Components  Build by composing components known as plug-ins  Middleware and infrastructure  Flexible UI paradigm  Scalable UIs  Help support  Error handling  Disconnected operation  Run stand-alone without network connection

The Eclipse Rich Client Platform  Native user experience  Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit provides GUI  Portability  Support for heterogeneous OSs & client environments  Development tooling support  Component libraries  Eclipse community

Chapter 2. Eclipse RCP Concept

A Community of Plug-ins  Plug-in is a collection of files and a manifest  The basic unit of functionality is plug-in (or a bundle in OSGi terms)  Assembles a collection of plug-ins

OSGi Framework  Supplying a component model to Java  Forms a framework for defining, composing and executing components or bundles  Manage dependencies and classpaths of bundles  Knit together the installed plug-ins, allowing them to interact and collaborate

Equinox  Making the eclipse runtime more dynamic and support plug-in install and uninstall without restarting  Implement plug-in or bundle model  Extension Registry  Declaring relationships between plug-ins

Standard Widget Toolkit(SWT)  Low-level graphics library  List, menu, font, color etc.  Provides access to the widgets  Available on a wide variety of Oss  Consistent, portable Java API  Stand-alone library  Does not depend on Equinox or OSGi  Can be used outside of Eclipse or RCP

JFace  Adds structure and facilities to SWT  It includes a whole range of UI toolkit components  Forms the basis of the Eclipse UI  Work with SWT without hiding it

UI Workbench  Adds presentation and coordination to Jface  Contribution-Based Extensibility  Provides extension points that allow plug-ins  scalability of the UI in complexity & performance  Perspectives, Views, and Editors  A visual container for views and editors  Supports a particular set of tasks

Summary  OSGi and Equinox  Plug-ins interact via the extension registry and public API classes  SWT, Jface and UI Workbench  Build portable, highly scalable and customizable UIs